“Hypnotized,” Fleetwood Mac, from “Mystery To Me,” 1973. I hear Bob Welch’s song and I am taken right back to the deep quiet of those long-ago late nights, listening to the free-form FM radio, sorting through my teenage life and wondering what the future held. Something about Carlos Castaneda, peyote and dreams. Here’s one interpretation, suggested in the comments when we wrote about “Hypnotized” on that foggy winter’s night in March 2009.

I’m not sure I’ve ever figured out what the song was all about. The enduring power of “Hypnotized” was such that when I started buying vinyl LPs again a few years ago, a rough copy of “Mystery To Me” was one of the first records I grabbed out of a dollar bin. Or I think of winter’s fog, a suitably eerie time for an ethereal and vaguely mysterious song. No, when I think of “Hypnotized,” I think of late nights, which is when I most often heard it in the early ’70s. It’s not at all the kind of moment I associate with the song that introduced me to Bob Welch. The news of former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch’s passing came on a gorgeously sunny day in our corner of Wisconsin. It’s the same kind of story that seems to come down from long ago